Knight's Gambit

  But that was twelve years ago; now his uncle only said, first: ‘Stop. I’ll drive.’

  ‘No you wont,’ he said. ‘This is fast enough.’ Within a mile now they would begin to pass the white fence; in two they would reach the gate and even see the house.

  ‘It was the quiet,’ his uncle said. ‘At first I couldn’t even sleep at night for it. But that was all right, because I didn’t want to sleep; I didn’t want to miss that much of silence: just to lie in bed in the dark and remember tomorrow and tomorrow and all the colored spring, April and May and June, morning noon and evening, empty, then dark again and silence to lie in because I didn’t need to sleep. Then I saw her. She was in the old stained victoria with the two mismatched plow-horses drawing it and the plow-hand on the box who didn’t even have on shoes. And your mother was wrong. She didn’t look like a parading doll at all. She looked like a little girl playing grown-up in the carriage-house, but playing it in deadly seriousness; like a child of twelve say, orphaned by sudden catastrophe, upon whom has devolved the care of a whole litter of younger brothers and sisters and perhaps even an aged grandparent, supervising the diet and changing and washing out the garments of infants; too young to have a vicarious interest in, let alone the conception of and kinship with the passion and mystery which created them alive into the world, which alone could have made the drudgery of feeding them bearable or even explicable.

  ‘Of course it wasn’t that. There was only her father, and if anything, the situation was reversed: the father who not only farmed the land and supervised the household, but did it in such a way that a plow-team and its driver from the field could be spared always to draw those six miles back and forth to town, the old carriage against the tremendous expanse of whose cushions she could resemble an archaic miniature, sober and sedate and demure ten years beyond her age and fifty years beyond her time. But that was the impression I got: a child playing house in that windless and timeless garden at the red and stinking corridor’s end: and so one day I knew suddenly and irrevocably that just silence was not peace. It was after I saw her the third or the tenth or the thirtieth time, I dont remember which, but one morning I stood beside the halted carriage with the barefoot nigger on the box and she like something preserved from an old valentine or a 1904 candy-box against that faded soiled expanse of back seat (when the carriage passed, all you saw was just her head, and from behind you couldn’t even see that though obviously the hand and the team wouldn’t have been taken from the plow just to give the plowman a ride to town and back);—one morning I stood beside the halted carriage while on all sides rushed and squawked the bright loud glittering new automobiles because the war was won and every man would be rich and at peace forever.

  ‘ “I’m Gavin Stevens,” I said. “And I’m going on thirty years old.”

  ‘ “I know it,” she said. But I felt thirty, even if I wasn’t quite. She was sixteen. And how could you say to a child (as we said then): “Give me a date?” And what would you (at thirty) do with it? And you dont just simply invite the child: you ask the child’s parents if it can come. So it was just dusk when I stopped your grandmother’s car at the gate and got out. There was a garden then, not a florist’s landscaping dream. It was a good deal bigger than even five or six rugs spread side by side, with old bushes of roses and callican-thus and paintless collapsing arbors and trellises and beds of perennials re-seeding themselves without outside meddling help or let, and she standing in the middle of it watching me as I entered the gate and went up the walk until she couldn’t see me any more. And I knew she would not have moved from where she stood, and I mounted the steps to where the old gentleman sat in his hickory chair with the setter pup at his feet and the silver cup and the marked book at his elbow, and I said,

  ‘ “Let me be betrothed to her” (mark how I put it: me to her). “I know,” I said. “I know: not now. Not now. Just let us be betrothed, and we wont even have to think about it again.”

  ‘And she hadn’t moved from where she stood, not even for listening. Because it was too far for listening, and besides she didn’t need to: just standing there in the dusk the twilight, not moving: not shrinking, just not anything at all; it was even I who tilted up her face though it took no more strength than to raise a strand of honeysuckle. It was like tasting sherbet.

  ‘ “I dont know how,” she said. “You’ll have to teach me.”

  ‘ “Dont learn then,” I said. “It’s all right. It doesn’t even matter. You dont have to learn.” It was like sherbet: the rest of spring, and summer and the long rest of summer: the darks and silence to lie in, remembering sherbet: not retasting it because you dont need to retaste sherbet; it doesn’t take much sherbet because you dont forget it. Then it was time for me to go back to Germany and I took the ring out to her. I had already looped it onto the ribbon myself.

  ‘ “You dont want me to wear it yet?” she said.

  ‘ “Yes,” I said. “No,” I said. “All right. Loop it over the bush here if you want to. It’s just a little piece of glass and colored iron; it probably wont even last a thousand years.” And I went back to Heidelberg and every month the letters would come, talking about nothing. Because how could they? She was just sixteen; what can have happened to just sixteen to write about, even talk about? And each month I answered, talking about nothing too, because how could just sixteen have translated it if I had, translated it to? And that’s what I never did understand, never did find out,’ his uncle said.

  Now they were almost there; he was already slowing the car to enter the gate.

  ‘Not how she got the German translated,’ his uncle said. ‘But how whoever translated the German for her, translated the English too.’

  ‘German?’ he said. ‘You wrote her in German?’

  ‘There were two letters,’ his uncle said. ‘I wrote them at the same time. I sealed and mailed them in the wrong envelopes.’ Then his uncle cried, ‘Look out!’ and even reached for the wheel. But he caught the car in time.

  ‘The other one was a woman too,’ he said. ‘Yes. So that——’

  ‘She was a Russian,’ his uncle said. ‘She had escaped from Moscow. For a price, paid by installments, over a long time, to different collectors. She was through a war too, O my Philistine. I knew her in Paris in 1918. When I left America in the fall of ’19 to go back to Heidelberg, I thought, believed I had forgotten her. That is, one day in mid-ocean I discovered that I hadn’t thought about her since spring. And so I knew I hadn’t forgot. I changed my booking and went to Paris first; she was to follow me to Heidelberg as soon as someone would visé what papers she had. I would write to her each month too while we waited. Maybe while I waited. You must bear in mind my age. I was a European then. I was in that menopause of every sensitive American when he believes that what (if any) future Americans’ claim not even to human spirit but to simple civilization has, lies in Europe. Or maybe that was wrong. Maybe it was simply, sherbet, and I was not even allergic to sherbet nor even impervious to it but simply incapable of sherbet; writing the two letters at the same time because it didn’t even demand any cerebral process to compose one of them, that one flowing from somewhere around, amid the intestines, out to the finger-tips, the pen-point, the ink without detour via the brain: as a result of which I was never even able to recall what could have been in the one which went where I had not written it to go, though there couldn’t have been much doubt; never occurred to me to remember to be careful with them because they did not exist in the same world although the same hand wrote them at the same desk upon successive sheets of paper with the same one unbroken pen-stroke beneath the same two pfennigs’ worth of electricity while the same space on the clock’s dial crept beneath the moving hand.’

  Then they were there. His uncle didn’t have to say stop; he had already parked the car in the empty drive too wide too suave and too neatly raked and graveled for even a station wagon and a convertible or two and a limousine and something for the servants, his uncle not even waiting fo
r that but already out of the car and walking toward the house while he, Charles, was still saying,

  ‘I dont have to come in too, do I?’

  ‘Haven’t you come a little far to quit now?’ his uncle said.

  So he got out too and followed, up the flagged walk too wide and with too many flagstones in it, toward the side portico which, merely a side one, would have held a president and cabinet or a supreme court all right though a little cozy for Congress, and the house itself like something between a gargantuan bride’s cake and a freshly whitewashed circus tent, his uncle still going fast and still talking:

  ‘We are strangely apathetic toward some very sound foreign customs. Think what a blaze it would have made, with his coffin on stacked gasoline-soaked cross-ties high in the middle of it: its (the house’s) amortization one with its creator’s suttee.’

  Then inside; the Negro butler opened the door and immediately vanished and he and his uncle stood in the room in which Captain Gualdres (assuming he was or had been cavalry) could have paraded his troop, horses too, though he noticed little else because it was the orchid again: recognised at once, immediately, without surprise not even attention. Then he even forgot the pleasant savor, titillation of simple tremendousness, because she came in: her feet in the hall and then into the room, though he had already smelled it, as if somebody had opened an old drawer by gaucherie, clumsiness, mistake and forty servants in rubber soles jumping frantically through the long corridors and rooms of glash and glitter to hurry it shut again; coming into the room and stopping and beginning to put her hands up palm-out in front of her without even having time to look at him since his uncle, who had never really stopped at all, was already walking toward her.

  ‘I’m Gavin Stevens and now I’m almost fifty,’ his uncle said, walking on toward her even after she began to retreat, fall back, bringing the hands higher and still palm-out toward his uncle, his uncle walking right on into the hands too and still walking right on while she was still trying to hold him away long enough to at least give herself time to change her mind about wanting to turn and run: too late now, assuming that was what she wanted or anyway thought she ought to do: but too late now, so that his uncle could stop too, looking back at him.

  ‘Now what?’ his uncle said. ‘You can say something, cant you? Even good afternoon Mrs Harriss will do.’

  He started to say ‘Excuse me.’ But already he had thought of something better than that.

  ‘Bless you, my children,’ he said.

  5

  That was Saturday. The next day was December seventh. But even before he left, the store windows were already bright with toys and tinsel and artificial snow like any other December in any other year, the air bright and merry with the taste and smell of Christmas even with gunfire in it, the gunfire and the whine of bullets and the sound they made on flesh getting ready to echo right here in Jefferson before many more weeks or months.

  But when he saw Jefferson next, it was spring. The wagons and pick-ups of the hill farmers and the five- and ten-ton trucks of the bottomland planters and operators had already backed up to the loading platforms of the seed stores and the fertilizer warehouses, and tractors and spanned and tripled mules would be moving across the dark shearing of the land’s winter sleep: plow and middlebuster, harrow and drag and disc; dogwood would bloom soon and soon the whippoorwills, but this was only 1942 and there would be a little time yet before the party-line telephones would begin to carry the War and Navy Department telegrams, and on Thursday mornings the RFD carrier would leave in the lonely post-perched boxes the weekly Yoknapatawpha Clarion bearing the reproduced photograph and the brief obit already too familiar yet still cryptic as Sanscrit or Chinese—the country-boy face not really old enough yet to be a man’s photograph, the uniform still showing the creases of the quartermaster shelves, the place-names which those who had created that face and flesh apparently in order that it might die in agony there, had never even heard of before, let alone pronounce.

  Because the inspector-general had been right. In fact, Benbow Sartoris, who had been only nineteenth in the class, had his commission and was already in England on something hush hush. Which, first and cadet colonel on the battalion list, he might have been doing too before it was too late, except that as usual he had exchanged the devil for the witch: not even the Sam Browne and the sabre and the trick insigne now, but only the blue hat-band and, even though being a cadet colonel or maybe that particular cadet colonel had shortened preflight some, probably a year yet before the winged badge on the cap would move down to just above the left pocket (with the shield of a pilot in the middle he hoped or at least a navigator’s globe or anyway a bomb dropper’s bomb).

  And not even coming home really but just passing it on the way from preflight to basic, airplanes at last, only stopping in the station long enough for his mother to get on the train and ride with him down to the mainline junction where he would get a train for Texas and she would come back on the next local; approaching, passing, beginning to pass the familiar land: the road crossings he knew, the fields and woods where he had hiked as a cub then a scout and, old enough at last for a gun, hunted rabbits first and then quail on the wing.

  Then the shabby purlieus themselves timeless and durable, familiar as his own voracious omnivorous insatiable heart or his body and limbs or the growth of his hair and fingernails: the first Negro cabins weathered and paintless until you realised it was more than just that and that they were a little, just a little awry: not out of plumb so much as beyond plumb: as though created for, seen in or by a different perspective, by a different architect, for a different purpose or anyway with a different past: surviven or even impervious to, unaware of, harder air or weather, whatever it was, each in its fierce yet orderly miniature jungle of vegetable patch, each with a shoat hog in a pen too small for any hog to thrive in yet this one did and would, and usually a tethered cow and a few chickens, the whole thing—cabin outhouse washpot shed and well—having a quality flimsy and make-shift, alien yet inviolably durable like Crusoe’s cave; then the houses of white people, no larger than the Negro ones but never cabins, not to their faces anyway or you’d probably have a fight on your hands, painted or at least once-painted, the main difference being that they wouldn’t be quite so clean inside.

  Then he was home: a paved street-crossing not very far from the house he had been born in, and now he could see above the trees the water tank and the gold cross on the spire of the Episcopal church and then no more: his face pressed to the grimy glass as if he were eight years old, the train slowing over a clash and clatter of switch-points among the box- and cattle-cars and the gondolas and the tanks, and there they were, seen as the child of eight sees them: with something of shock, set puny yet amazingly durable against the perspective of the vast encompassable earth: his mother: his uncle: his new aunt: and his mother had been married to one man for twenty years and had raised another one, and his new aunt had been married to two in about that same time and had watched two more in her own house fighting each other with hearth-brooms and horses, so he was not surprised nor did he even really know how it happened: his mother already in the train and his new aunt already gone back to the waiting car while he and his uncle had the one last word together:

  ‘Well, Squire,’ he said. ‘You not only went once too many to the well, you threw the pitcher in and then jumped in after it. I’ve got a message from your son.’

  ‘My who?’ his uncle said.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Your son-in-law. Your daughter’s husband. The one that dont like you. He came out to camp to see me. He’s a cavalryman now. I mean a soldier, an American’—tediously, himself recapitulant: ‘You understand? One night an American acquaintance tried to kill him with a horse. The next day he married the American’s sister. The day after that a Jap dropped a bomb on another American on a little island two thousand miles away. So on the third day he enlisted, not into his own army in which he already held a reserve commission, but int
o the foreign one, renouncing not only his commission to do so but his citizenship too, using an interpreter without doubt to explain both to his bride and to his adopted government what he was trying to do’—remembering, still recapitulant, not amazed or if amazed, the tireless timeless amazement of the child watching tireless and timeless the repetitive Punch and Judy booth: that afternoon and no warning whatever until the summons to the orderly room, and there Captain Gualdres was ‘—in a private’s uniform, looking more like a horse than ever, maybe because of the fact that he had got himself into the one situation or condition above earth—a 1942 United States Army cavalry regiment—where as long as the war lasted he would have no contact whatever with horses—’ himself (Charles) repetitive too: ‘He didn’t look brave, he just looked indomitable, not offering a life or a limb to anyone, any government in gratitude for or protest against any thing, as if in this final and serious moment neither would he assume any sentimental pretence regarding the vain and idle pattering of bullets against him any more than he had used to about the vain and fragile hooves of horses; not hating Germans or Japs or even Harrisses, going to war against Germans not because they had ruined a continent and were rendering a whole race into fertilizer and lubricating oil, but because they had abolished horses from civilised cavalry, getting up from the chair when I came in and saying,

  ‘ “I come here so you can see me. Now you have seen me. Now you will return to your uncle and say to him, Perhaps you are satisfied now.” ’

  ‘What?’ his uncle said.

  ‘I dont know either,’ he said. ‘That’s what he said: that he had come all the way there from Kansas so I could see him in that brown suit and then come back to you and say, “Now maybe you’re satisfied.” ’